Altered states of consciousness – including experiences of deprivation, pain, hallucination, fear, desire, alienation, and spiritual transcendence – can transform the ordinary experience of selfhood. Unselfing explores the nature of disruptive self-experiences and the different shapes they have taken in literary writing. The book focuses on the tension between rival conceptions of unselfing as either a form of productive self-transcendence or a form of alienating self-loss. Michaela Hulstyn explores the shapes and meanings of unselfing through the framework of the global French literary world, encompassing texts by modernist figures in France and Belgium alongside writers from Algeria, Rwanda, and Morocco. Together these diverse texts prompt a re-evaluation of the consequences of the loss or the transcendence of the self. Through a series of close readings, Hulstyn offers a new account of the ethical questions raised by altered states and shows how philosophies of empathy can be tested against and often challenged by literary works. Drawing on cognitive science and phenomenology, Unselfing provides a new methodology for approaching texts that give shape to the fringes of conscious experience.

Like Jane Austen and Henry James, but also like Fyodor Dostoevsky and Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch is a keen student of those egoistic obsessions that cloud our moral understanding. In Iris Murdoch's Fables of Unselfing, David J. Gordon probes more deeply and comprehensively than any previous critic the intellectual energies, and the ethical imperative of "unselfing", that inform her fiction. Gordon contends that the term fable best describes the kind of novel Murdoch writes because in each a mythmaking purpose interacts with a commitment to realism, shaping the erotic life of fictional characters into a spiritual pilgrimage on which they struggle, more or less unsuccessfully, to overcome the self-centeredness that keeps them away from the Good. The most original element in the fiction, Gordon argues, is not its striking modernization of Plato or its adaptations of nineteenth-century influences, but its intensely creative struggle with Freud. In developing his analysis of her themes, Gordon draws on Murdoch's work from throughout her forty-year career, showing how each novel grew out of its predecessors and in what ways each is original.

In this highly-interdisciplinary volume, we systematically study the role of metaphors and analogies in (mis)shaping our understanding of the world. Metaphors and Analogies occupy a prominent place in scientific discourses, as they do in literature, humanities and at the very level of our thinking itself. But when misused they can lead us astray, blinding our understanding inexorably. How can metaphors aid us in our understanding of the world? What role do they play in our scientific discourses and in humanities? How do they help us understand and skillfully deal with our complex socio-political scenarios? Where is the dividing line between their use and abuse? Join us as we explore some of these questions in this volume.

The context for this interdisciplinary work by a philosopher and a clinician is the psychiatric care provided to those with severe mental disorders. Such a setting makes distinctive moral demands on the very character of the practitioner, it is shown, calling for special virtues and greater virtue than many other practice settings. In a practice so attentive to the patient's self identity, the authors promote a heightened awareness of cultural and particularly gender issues. By elucidating the nature of the moral psychology and character of the good psychiatrist, this work provides a sustained application of virtue theory to clinical practice. With its roots in Aristotelian writing, The Virtuous Psychiatrist presents virtue traits as habits, able to be cultivated and enhanced through training. The book describes these traits, and how they can be habituated in clinical training. A turn towards virtue theory within philosophy during the last several decades has resulted in important research on professional ethics. By approaching the ethics of psychiatric professionals in these virtue terms, Radden and Sadler's work provides an original application of this theorizing to practice. Of interest to both theorists and practitioners, the book explores the tension between the model of enduring character implicit in virtue theory and the segmented personae of role-specific moral responses. Clinical examples are provided, based upon dramaturgical vignettes (caseplays) which illustrate both the interactions of the case participants as well as the inner monologue of the clinician protagonist.

The Oxford Handbook of Psychotherapy Ethics explores a whole range of ethical issues in the heterogenous field of psychotherapy. It will be an essential book for psychotherapists in clinical practice and valuable for those professionals providing mental health services beyond psychology and medicine, including counsellors and social workers.

What is a human being? What does it mean to be human? How can you lead your life in ways that best fulfil your own nature? In The Human Paradox, Ralph Heintzman explores these vital questions and offers an exciting new vision of the nature of the human. The Human Paradox aims to counter or correct several contemporary assumptions about the nature of the human, especially the tendency of Western culture, since the seventeenth century, to identify the human with rationality and the rational mind. Using the lens of the virtues, The Human Paradox shows how rediscovering the nature of the human can help not just to understand one’s own paradoxical nature but to act in ways that are more consistent with its full reality. Offering accessible insight from both traditional and contemporary thought, The Human Paradox shows how a fuller, richer vision of the human can help address urgent contemporary problems, including the challenges of cultural and religious diversity, human migration and human rights, the role of the market, artificial intelligence, the future of democracy, and global climate change. This fresh perspective on the Western past will guide readers into what it means to be human and open new possibilities for the future.

Love and Vulnerability: Thinking with Pamela Sue Anderson developed out of the desire for dialogue with the late feminist philosopher Pamela Sue Anderson’s extraordinary, previously unpublished, last work on love and vulnerability. The collection publishes this work for the first time, with a diverse, multidisciplinary, international range of contributors responding to it, to Anderson’s oeuvre as a whole and to her life and death. Anderson’s path-breaking work includes A Feminist Philosophy of Religion (1998) and Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion: Reason, Love and Epistemic Locatedness (2012). Her last work critiques, then attempts to rebuild, concepts of love and vulnerability. Reason, critical self-reflexivity, emotion, intuition and imagination, myth and narrative all have a role to play. Social justice, friendship, conversation, dialogue, collective work are central to her thinking. Contributors trace the emergence of Anderson’s late thinking, extend her conversations with the history of philosophy and contemporary voices such as hooks and Butler, and bring her work into contact with debates in theology; Continental and analytic philosophy; feminist, queer and transgender theory; postcolonial theory; African-American studies. Discussions engage with the Me Too movement and sexual violence, climate change, sweatshops, neoliberalism, death and dying, and the nature of the human. Originally published as a special issue of the journal, Angelaki, this large, wide-ranging collection, featuring a number of distinguished contributors, makes a significant contribution to the burgeoning interdisciplinary research on interpersonal relations, sympathy and empathy, affect and emotion.

Western Buddhist travel narratives are autobiographical accounts of a journey to a Buddhist culture. Dozens of such narratives have since the 1970s describe treks in Tibet, periods of residence in a Zen monastery, pilgrimages to Buddhist sites and teachers, and other Asian odysseys. The best known of these works is Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard; further reflections emerge from thirty writers including John Blofeld, Jan Van de Wetering, Thomas Merton, Oliver Statler, Robert Thurman, Gretel Ehrlich, and Bill Porter. The Buddhist concept of 'no-self' helps these authors interpret certain pivotal experiences of 'unselfing' and is also a catalyst that provokes and enables such events. The writers' spiritual memoirs describe how their journeys brought about a new understanding of Buddhist enlightenment and so transformed their lives. Showing how travel can elicit self-transformation, this book is a compelling exploration of the journeys and religious changes of both individuals and Buddhism itself.

Psychedelics are part of a resurgence of interest in consciousness studies, especially as altered states of consciousness are being re-examined in the context of psychedelic-assisted therapies. To date, discussions about psychedelics in modern medicine have been dominated by studies in biomedicine. However, given that cultural factors play a significant role in the subjective effects of psychedelics, psychedelics can be considered a uniquely powerful point of convergence between the cultural and biomedical. Writers and artists, alongside psychiatrists and pharmacologists, have participated in shaping ‘the psychedelic experience’ by drawing on a rich set of approaches that blend narrative, arts, and humanities concepts to explain and interpret psychedelic experiences and explore consciousness for creative purposes. Psychedelic studies, past and present, emphasize the importance of ‘set and setting’ or the context of psychedelic consumption and its paramount importance in shaping psychedelic experiences. These non-pharmacological factors rely on a different set of methods and interpretations that necessarily rely on studies conducted outside of the biomedical sciences.

Humility, Pride, and Christian Virtue Theory proposes an account of humility that relies on the most radical Christian sayings about humility, especially those found in Augustine and the early monastic tradition. It argues that this was the view of humility that put Christian moral thought into decisive conflict with the best Greco-Roman moral thought. This radical Christian account of humility has been forgotten amidst contemporary efforts to clarify and retrieve the virtue of humility for secular life. Kent Dunnington shows how humility was repurposed during the early-modern era-particularly in the thought of Hobbes, Hume, and Kant-to better serve the economic and social needs of the emerging modern state. This repurposed humility insisted on a role for proper pride alongside humility, as a necessary constituent of self-esteem and a necessary motive of consistent moral action over time. Contemporary philosophical accounts of humility continue this emphasis on proper pride as a counterbalance to humility. By contrast, radical Christian humility proscribes pride altogether. Dunnington demonstrates how such a radical view need not give rise to vices of humility such as servility and pusillanimity, nor need such a view fall prey to feminist critiques of humility. But the view of humility set forth makes little sense abstracted from a specific set of doctrinal commitments peculiar to Christianity. This study argues that this is a strength rather than a weakness of the account since it displays how Christianity matters for the shape of the moral life.